One-Pager
The standard for enterprise AI governance, with a deterministic engine that proves it.
Confidential · June 2026. All figures are illustrative placeholders unless sourced.
The problem
Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can govern it. Boards now carry the liability, regulators are arriving in force — the EU AI Act penalty reaches 7% of global turnover and is already in force — and compliance is the single largest barrier to adoption: Deloitte finds regulatory compliance is the #1 barrier to GenAI at 38%. Meanwhile, most of the AI a company actually uses is invisible. There is no shared, audit-defensible way to see what's running, prove it meets a standard, and keep that proof current.
The category answer: see, prove, run
govrn.ai is one record viewed through two lenses. govrn is the standard — See it and prove it — built for the CISO and the board. Aperture is the engine — Run it — built for the CTO and the CFO. The standard sees it and proves it; the Aperture engine runs it. The two are joined by an interface that carries evidence, not a verdict — so attestation stays independent of measurement.
What we have
- The Aperture engine — built and tested. Deterministic, with no model in the measurement path, so results are reproducible and audit-defensible. It uses pointers, not payloads — metadata only, enforced — to surface shadow AI with a dollar figure and attributed cost and usage. It is pre-MVP on live data: connectors are built but have not yet run against a live API. The $121k / 22%-shadow demo is the real engine on synthetic seed data — modeled, not a customer result.
- The govrn standard — live. A three-lens assessment (technology, security, AI), six-framework crosswalks (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, EU AI Act, OWASP, ATLAS, CSF 2.0), independent attestation (never self-certified), and review of the AI a company actually ships.
- The seam — designed. The govrn-interface is specified in markdown; code is next.
See The Standard and the Engine and the Roadmap.
The play: entity-first → license → Microsoft
Stand up the company first — entity, team, raise — before any partner conversation. Then license the process, the product, and the brand. Kelly / MCG Kelly Services is the first channel — de-risked distribution, not the destination. Microsoft is the horizon, reachable through the team's senior-Microsoft relationships.
The annuity is structural: an attestation is valid only against a fresh record, so continuous measurement is required. We deliver coupled and renew decoupled. Evidence stays portable — sovereignty, not lock-in. The durable moat is independence — the body that builds is never the body that attests — plus an accumulated, attributed record that compounds with time. See Business Model.
The team
Richard Taubin (Founder — standard, brand, GTM), Joe Saba (CAIO — the Aperture engine), Chris Bennett (CTO — enterprise infrastructure, Azure, senior-Microsoft relationships), Roberto Lleras (CSO — data science and AI), and Sean Barlow (full-stack and AI engineering). A repository of the team's combined enterprise SME expertise is incoming. See Team.
The market
AI-governance platform spend is projected to grow from $492M to over $1B by 2030 (Gartner), with 75% of the world's economies under AI regulation by 2030 (Gartner) and board AI-risk oversight jumping from 16% to 48% of the Fortune 100 in a single year (EY). See Market.
The ask
We are raising $[ amount ] (illustrative) to connect the live connectors, stand up multi-tenant isolation, auth, RBAC, and audit, and convert the first channel into measured — not modeled — results.
See Executive Summary.